Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “They need to be able to support themselves, Your Excellency.”

  “Consider the lilies of the field,” he purred. “God will provide, will he not?” He put on his counseling face, an expression of grave though kindly concern. “Don’t you think your efforts have been too successful? You are able to support the church and school from your fisheries. Thus the parents of the children in the school are required to pay very little tuition.The parishioners provide very little support for the church.”

  “They are not well-to-do people, Your Excellency. Many of them could not possibly afford tuition, and the best efforts of the entire congregation could not possibly support the church. It’s a monstrous edifice.” In Aggie’s opinion it should have been razed a century ago instead of being rebuilt bit by bit through a century’s effort by the Abbey of St. Clare.

  He stared at the ceiling, fingers pointed together, thumbs rotating. “For the sake of their souls, they should be making a greater effort.”

  “You wish us to stop the fisheries project for the sake of their souls? We are to tell them this?”

  He looked only momentarily startled, like a man who has suddenly put a foot in a hole. “No … not precisely. We simply feel the management of such a very large business by an order of nuns undermines the special role of women in the Church. It was Adam, after all, who was directed by God to bring forth food by the sweat of his brow. And it was Eve who was told to obey. I remind you of that, Reverend Mother. You, too, are expected to obey. You took a vow of obedience. The young women currently occupied in the fisheries might be better, more spiritually, occupied elsewhere.”

  Father Girard had already reminded her of the vow of obedience, she reminded herself. The vow had not been to obey the archbishop, particularly—but set that aside. She gritted her teeth, kept her voice calm: “Each sister is fully involved in our life of prayer whether she teaches in the school or harvests oysters from the ponds.”

  “Having sisters doing physical labor is not appropriate.”

  “Several of the disciples were fishermen.”

  “They were men.”

  She swallowed deeply, trying desperately for control. “Since we are highly mechanized, the work done at the ponds is somewhat less laborious than the work done in the laundry, which is traditionally women’s work. Scrubbing floors, also women’s work, is even more laborious, as is the annual digging up of the flower and vegetable beds.”

  “The laundry and gardens are more housewifely, more acceptable.” He said it as if by rote, without emotion, a programmed response like a computer voice. He didn’t care what argument she made. He had an answer for each. It didn’t matter that the answers were illogical and self-serving. He was not interested in discourse.

  She said with horrible conviction, “You have someone else in mind to run the business?”

  He shifted, raising one nostril. “A committee of the local chapter of Catholics for the Faith has agreed to take it over.”

  “A committee. Made up of whom?”

  He raised and rotated his chin, as though his collar were too tight. “Mother Agnes, is that really relevant?”

  “Completely relevant, Your Excellency. At Mother Elias’s request, before entering the abbey I took an M.B.A. in order to be capable of setting up and running this business, which she and her council had researched and determined upon. I have since trained others to take my place. I learned during the course of taking my degree that we would need biologists and biotechnicians, and some of the sisters were dispatched to acquire education in those fields. We have one Ph.D. chemist. Does your committee have these human resources?”

  He said angrily, “I have not inquired—”

  “These are not jobs that can be performed by unqualified people. There are serious public-health implications to the sale of shellfish. We work without salary, and we work fulltime. I don’t know where you will find other well-qualified people who will work full-time without significant paychecks. The Catholics for the Faith have not taken a vow of poverty as we have.”

  “That’s a matter—”

  “Also, since your committee is undoubtedly made up entirely of men, we would not be able to allow them in our enclosure.”

  “That can be handled. We can, for example, subdivide your property, build a wall across it. They have, after all, offered to share the profits of the farms fifty-fifty with the archdiocese.”

  She could not keep silent. “Fifty for the archdiocese. Fifty for Catholics for the Faith, whose main claim to fame, I seem to recall, is their opposition to an increasing role for women in the Church?”

  Now he was angry, his eyes narrowed, his lips twisted. “The pope spoke once and for all on that subject in 1994, Mother Agnes. No female priests! Jesus picked men as his disciples.”

  It was true. It was the one final argument that the men in the Church always fell back on. Jesus had picked men. Carolyn said no, not only men. Sophy said no, not only men; she’d researched it, and there had been women in the early Church, lots of them. Jesus had picked Jews, too. Jesus had picked married men, but the archbishop didn’t mention that. She took a shuddering breath. “Your Excellency, fifty percent of nothing is nothing. By the time you pay full salaries, and allow for a learning period, there’ll be very little profit even if an unqualified local committee could do the work, which I don’t believe it can.” That ought to reach him, if money was the motive.

  “When we build the wall,” he said stubbornly, his jaw tight.

  So it wasn’t just the money. What was it? “The land the fisheries occupy was a gift to our order and the donor specified that it reverts to other legatees if we do not occupy it in its entirety. I know there are heirs who would pursue the matter.”

  He turned a fiery glance upon her. Agnes set her mind upon obedience and tried to find a way out of this tangle. Whatever this matter had to do with, it wasn’t spirituality. She mustn’t let herself get furious with him. She mustn’t let herself! She could hold on to herself if she just understood what was going on.

  She summoned up a conciliatory tone, struggling to keep her voice calm and level and patient, oh, God, patient.

  “I’m sure you would agree that it would not be good for our laity to hear we are in a wrangle over who has the best qualifications to run a business which was begun here and has always been here. Our ability to manage is proved, and the results support the church. We would not want to deprive the church by turning this resource over to someone who does not have proved ability. Perhaps if Your Excellency would explain it to me …”

  He stared out the window, his thumbs spinning around one another like little rotors, his face still set with anger. “It is not a plan I can discuss in detail. The Holy Father simply feels that at this millennial time it is appropriate for the Church to make a special effort to renew the faith of its people.”

  “I haven’t heard about this special effort. Please tell me what you can about it.”

  He lifted one nostril again. “The Holy Father feels we have moved, in some cases, rather far from our spiritual foundation.We have been involved, not only in this country, in disputes that discredit our universality. The New Catechism, providing as it does that Islam is included in God’s plan of salvation, has given us a ground for further discussions with members of that persuasion, working toward a universality of faith for all mankind. You mentioned the increasing role of women in the Church. There is some feeling among both Christian and Islamic teachers that women’s roles are already quite demanding, and perhaps that they should return to their more traditional and very special place in God’s plan.…”

  What was going on here? She gritted her teeth and said expressionlessly, “Let us look at the accounts. Perhaps we can find some way to help.”

  He smiled, a smile that had nothing conciliatory in it. “Let us hope you can do it willingly and with a generous heart, Reverend Mother.” She heard it as a threat.

  When he had gone, she went to the cloister, half stumbling, to
lean against one of the stone pillars as she peered out blindly. So much for being in a state of grace. It was not proof against pain such as this. His words had been more than a threat to a business. They had come to her like a threat to a child, her child, her creation. The fisheries were profitable because of the labors she and the sisters had put into them, and every dime was allocated to their daily work.

  “What better way to fight the unifying message of holy wisdom than to sow inequality between men and women!” said a voice from behind her in a clear conversational tone.

  She spun around, looked into the garden, saw the flick of a white veil disappearing around the corner of the church. Who had spoken? No point in lying to herself. It was Sophy. Father had told her to forget or be damned. How could she forget? Sophy wouldn’t let her forget!

  She had resolved never to tell the DFC what she’d seen at the meeting in San Francisco. She had decided to go to this one last meeting, only this one, and keep her mouth shut during it except to say good-bye. Whatever Sophy had done or meant to do, Sophy was now gone. If Agnes herself left, there would be no one to speak of it, ever.

  Now, in an instant, her decision was overthrown. She pressed her fingers into her temples, trying to find the source of that bone-deep ache, trying to assuage it. No good. She went out of the cloister into the garden, found a sun-warmed bench, and collapsed onto it, not even bothering to straighten her skirts, weary as though the bench were an Everest she had achieved after long and arduous effort. Well, she had climbed and climbed and climbed. All her life she’d turned toward the steepest slopes with a ready heart. Now Father wanted to take away the memory of Sophy, and the archbishop wanted to take away all her achievement. No question about it. They would make her decline and fall.

  The DFC had argued for years over what a “decline and fall” might be, but surely this would qualify under anyone’s definition. Faye thought Carolyn’s marriage was a fall, and Bettiann thought the same about Faye’s being a lesbian, and Jessamine shook her head at Bettiann’s living on her husband’s income, and Ophy thought Jessamine marrying someone she didn’t really love was a fall, which Jessamine denied, then admitted, then denied again. And Agnes thought Ophy sometimes did things as a doctor that were a fall, and, of course, so far as Carolyn was concerned, Aggie’s being a nun was a skydive from thirty thousand feet with no parachute.

  And Sophy? Sophy had listened to all this attack and defense openmouthed, but only briefly. When the argument had threatened to become personal and acrimonious—a rare thing among the seven of them—she had cried out:

  “Stop it! We can’t decide for one another what a fall is. Each woman can only decide for herself. Ever since men destroyed Elder Sister’s medicine bag, conscience is all women have.”

  “Oh, wonderful! You’ve got a new story for us,” Aggie had cried, grateful for the interruption. Some of Sophy’s stories were delightful, and some of them were painful, but either would be better than this wrangle they were in. “On a scale of one to ten, how many hankies will we need?”

  Sophy pursed her lips. “This story isn’t sad exactly.”

  “Good,” Aggie said, echoed by the others with rueful laughter, all equally glad of the respite.

  “This all happened long and long ago, at the beginning of the world,” said Sophy. “Nothing sensible lived then but the Mother of all, which is wisdom. Time came Mother was lonesome, so she let her womanly blood flow into the ashes of her fire, and she mixed this with clay, and from this she molded seven daughters and baked them in the life-fire.

  “When they were baked, Mother named them and admired them and taught them to converse and dance and sing, and she gave them freedom to think and speak, in order that she might learn from them and with them, for one mind, she told them, is only one mind, no matter how wise, and it benefits from the thoughts of others.

  “And when they were well grown, she told them to make a live world by taking their womanly blood and mixing it with ooze from the swamp or at the edges of the sea, and building it into creatures and trees and plants, many kinds, large and small, but to make each kind slowly, changing it as was needful, and not to make more of their own kind until they understood well how the world worked.

  “ ‘Each thing you make influences each other thing,’ she said. ‘First you must learn how things work together, or you may destroy your heritage before you know what it is.’

  “So the earth daughters lived for a long time without any other people, building many different creatures and seeing how they fit together and how they changed over time, learning how the earth worked.

  “Then one day the oldest sister said, ‘To spread the life plan among each kind of creature, we have given it sex, so that each young one born is different from all others who have come before, changing throughout the ages, and of these changes are lives and histories made, so that in time each thing that can be, will be. Such is the purpose of Wisdom; therefore, we, too, should have young in which our own lifeplans are mixed and changed. Shall we do as the wolf does with her mate, or the doe deer with their king, or shall we be like the lizard that lives on the rocks and needs no male at all? Shall we be as the spider, who eats her mate to have done with him? Or the tree that mates in the wind? Shall we have males or not?’

  “And after talking it over and looking at all the males, they decided it would be pleasurable to have males who were handsome as the stags and bucks who trumpeted upon the mountaintops.

  “But a younger sister said, ‘If we have males hanging around all the time, they will get in the way and become quarrelsome. They will be as the stags are, always crashing their heads together.’

  “So the oldest sister thought a long time, and finally she said, ‘We could make males some other way.’

  “ ‘But they are so handsome,’ cried the sisters. ‘Look at them, Elder Sister, at their heads so proud, at their haunches so strong. Look at them! Aren’t they handsome?’

  “Elder Sister looked at them, and they were very handsome. She said, ‘It is true, they are proud and virile. But the stags crash their heads together because each one wants all the females to bear his young. Even when the females do not want them, the males chase them and harass them, to control them. If we make handsome, troublesome males like this, they will want to control us, and that will lead to evil. As you know from watching the creatures we have made, when sex is alive in the world, creatures think and smell and see only the sex part. So if we have males, we will put their sex and ours in a medicine bag, and we will let it out only when we want children. That way we can have young from time to time but still be peaceable.’

  “And another sister asked, ‘But what will they do with their time? We raise the food and build the houses. What is there for them to do?’

  “So Elder Sister said, ‘Males can explore the world and all its wonderful places. Males can hunt and fish and tell stories of great wonders. Males can paint their faces and make costumes out of fur and feathers, and in time they may grow wise and seek other of Mother’s children who live among the stars. ’

  “And all the sisters thought this was a good idea, so they let their womanly blood flow into the ashes of the hearth fire and gathered up the mud they made and mixed it with the ooze from the swamp and so created men and baked the fire of life into them. But before the men were quite baked, the women put every man’s sex into a medicine bag, and also that part of themselves that would respond to the men, so they would not be troubled with it. And so the men came to life. They hunted and fished and painted their faces. They told stories around the fire. They captured animals and tamed them. And they helped the women when they had heavy things to lift, but they were not so very different from the women, and life was comfortable.

  “Until the time came when the women wanted children, so they decided to open the medicine bag and let sex out. When they did this, all the men began to crash their heads together and sing songs of themselves and prance around the cook fire. And the women admired them and
took them, and they made love, making children. But very soon things were not at all peaceful, as men began to fight with one another, and to leave one woman to chase and harass another, and to beat women who did not do as they said, and the women themselves lusted after other men. ‘This is not good,’ said Elder Sister. ‘We are not seeing one another clearly, we are seeing only the sex part.’ So the women shut up sexin the medicine bag once more, saying, ‘We must not let this bag be opened except rarely.’

  “But one man, the man who had lain with the eldest sister, saw what she did with the medicine bag, and he went to his brothers to tell them what had happened. He found his brothers in their house, all mourning the loss of their sex, for it had made their lives exciting and dangerous. ‘I know where it is,’ he said. ‘If you will all come with me to hold her down’—for Elder Sister was very strong—’we will take the medicine bag away.’

  “And this is what they did. They came in the night, while Elder Sister was sleeping, and they held her down while the one man found the medicine bag, and they tied her so she could not stop them when they ran away. They could not open the medicine bag, so they took their knives and cut it into tiny pieces, to let their sex out. And the pieces of the medicine bag stuck to every man’s sex, and the little pieces are there today, wrapped around the tips of men’s penises, a sign of their pride and their shame, for it is the sign of rape and force, and some men even cut it away, so as not to be reminded that they took sex by force and against women’s will.

  “Of course, the women’s sex came out of the bag as well, and since that time men have strutted their sex all the time and have fought and crashed their heads together, and women have lusted after improper males, and men and women have not seen one another clearly, so that men have laid hands on women to force them to do what women would not do.”